Spring Update

While spring by the calendar is still almost a month away, most of America is already seeing some signs of the warmer weather to come. We aren't seeing any leaves on the trees here yet, but our maples and elms are blooming. We also have quite a lot of bulbs coming up, and some perennials are starting to come back as well.

One of our red maples blooming.

Garden

Our seedlings are growing pretty well. I think we started some flowers too soon; we still have about 6 weeks until we can plant outside, and some of them are big enough to go outside in a week or two. Hopefully they just hang on for a while...

We have also started digging more garden beds. We figured to feed our family vegetables for the growing season, and have enough to store for the winter, we would need about 25 40X10' garden beds. I don't think we will have time to get nearly that many in this year, but we will do as many as we can.

The site we chose for the garden is in a fairly flat open spot behind the shop. It is a good location as far as distance from the house, and also gets good sun exposure, but the soil there is pretty bad since it's the fill dirt they used to raise the house/shop area out of the flood plain. We found a place nearby that sells bulk garden soil. It's a 50:50 mix of mushroom compost and sandy loam, which should be pretty good for growing in.

An American elm's seed pods.

Goats

All the goats have kidded except Eva. Seven kids have sold so far and have six more that aren't weaned yet. We recently purchased another doe and her two-month-old doeling. We are trying to rehome the doeling, so if anyone is interested in her please contact us!

We also just started selling our goat milk, it has sold pretty well to people who are already here for another reason, but we haven't had much interest in it directly. We ordered business cards yesterday to help spread the word locally.

The grass is slowly turning green. We've never been through an OK spring, so I don't know when we'll be able to start pasturing them. A few days ago, it was 16 degrees in the morning with about 30 MPH winds, not exactly good weather to put them out on pasture.

Chickens

As I mentioned in a previous blog, we are raising chicks to sell. We have sold one batch so far and picked up a third batch this morning.

Our laying flock is finally picking up on egg production, we have about 20 hens and are now getting around a dozen eggs a day. For the past few months, we have only been getting about four a day, due to the shorter days and they were also molting.

Ducks

We combined our two flocks of ducks a few days ago, one was our flock of four Pekins, and the other was our flock of about 20 Khaki Campbells. They are sort of scared of each other but not fighting. The Khaki Campbells should start laying sometime between now and May.

Rabbits

Our only left red New Zealand has a litter of seven bunnies that just opened their eyes. This is the longest we have had a litter of red New Zealand's live, so we are really hopeful that they will all survive.

Our two other does should have a litter sometime this month.

We have been able to pasture them for a while now, but we have the doe with the litter in the barn to try to reduce the chance of something happening to the bunnies.

Orchard

Some of the berries are getting leaves, but otherwise everything is still dormant.

Pigs

The Kune piglets are really not selling well. We may stop trying to raise them for sale, especially in OK, the market for them is just so bad. We will see how Millie's piglets do once they are here and if we are happy with them, we may switch over to IPP's with the primary goal being to raise them for our own consumption.